[music intro, tap for audio] Well hello, and welcome to Episode 44 of Aftershock Weekly This week we’re going to talk about Pay-Per-Click Marketing again

It’s good to refresh on what’s important when you’re building out pay-per-click campaigns, what to look at, what to focus on so you can get the best results So let’s start with this The first thing you want to focus on is the location and area of where you want to serve up your ads If you’re a local restaurant in Tempe, and you’re trying to attract people who search for Mexican food near me, you want to make sure that you’re in a very close proximity If you’re a company that sells online nationally, well, that’s not as important

Eventually you can identify things like different parts of the country that are more likely to purchase your product, but it’s important to take things like location into mind when you’re setting up campaigns Next thing is, time of day that you want your ads to run When do you want your ads to be triggered? If you’re only open from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, then you probably only want to have your campaigns on maybe a little bit before that and after, if you don’t have an answering service after the fact, or if you don’t have a good follow-up on your website for somebody to submit a form and get information the next day So keep that in mind when you’re setting up the times of day that you’re running Also, what days a week? If you’re only open Monday through Friday, does it make sense for you to have ads on Saturday and Sunday? Sometimes the answer is yes, because people will wait

Maybe you own a business like an insurance company and you only work from 9:00-5:00 Monday through Friday, but you have people searching on Saturday when they’re talking to their significant other about car insurance, or maybe they’re purchasing a home, and they’re just doing some research online Well you still want to trigger that ad so that that can turn into a lead that you can get to on Monday So keep those things in mind, of when you’re willing to be on, what days of the week, and what time So the next thing, and this is probably the most important thing I’m going to talk about, is Match Types when you’re putting in your keywords There’s four different match types

You have Broad Match, which means that if we said “yellow flower” it could show up for “maroon flower” or “maroon rose” because it’s so broad that it’ll show for a lot of search queries Now then you have Broad Match Modified Now that’s a plus sign by “yellow flower” and it’s only going to show for something very similar to “yellow flower”—maybe a misspelled “yellow” or “flower”—but it’ll also allow things by a yellow flower It’ll still trigger even though it’s adding to that phrase But those two specific keywords have to be in there when there’s a plus sign

Then you have Phrase Match Phrase Match means that “yellow flower” exactly has to be in a phrase “I want to buy a yellow flower” or “buy yellow flowers near me” And then there’s Exact Match, and Exact Match means that only that specific phrase will trigger an ad “Yellow flower”—so anything added before, in between, or after, will not trigger on Exact Match

So first thing is, get rid of Broad Match Do not use Broad Match keywords It’s a huge waste of money I can tell you that I’ve seen it on many campaigns that come over to us to take over, and it will trigger crazy searches that should never show your ad, and it’s important that you don’t use Broad Match Broad Match Modified you can use sparingly

You can definitely use it, because it’s going to make sure that those keywords have to be in the phrase or the search query that’s triggered, but you don’t want to use it too much Mostly Phrase Match and also Exact Match are what you’re going to want to use and to hone in over time, and you’re going to have longer-tail keywords that you’re going to see over time that you can add in to your campaigns So next, Negative Keywords What Keywords that if they’re in the search query do you not want to trigger an ad? Let’s say don’t want to sell your service for free or you don’t want to ad a free consultation Well “free” is probably a good thing to use as a Negative Keyword

Let’s say you’re selling homes but you don’t want to sell mobile homes, let’s just say Well, “mobile” would be a great Negative Keyword so if it shows up anywhere in the search query for one of your terms, it’s not going to trigger your ads So next, Ad Extensions Ad Extensions are extremely important, because it makes your ad as big as possible There’s a number of them

There’s Site Link Extensions that are different parts of your site, that you can have a description and link out to there Call Extensions, meaning a phone call, or your phone number shows up, they can click directly on that and call your business A Location Extension shows where your location is, pulls directly from Google My Business You have Call Out Extensions, which is just an extra line of text that they give you And it makes your ad as big as possible

There’s other Review and there’s App Extensions, but making sure that you fill out as much as you can, so that your ad can be as big as possible when it shows up, is going to give you a high likelihood to be clicked on The ads themselves—always run two ads for any different ad group, meaning that you want to have an A|B Test going The A|B Test could be as simple as, I’m going to change the subject line, or I should say the double headline, on one, and change it on the other, and see which one gets the better click-through rate You could also test two different landing pages Two exact ads that are sending to different landing pages so that you know which landing page is working better

But you should always have two ads running, and you should be testing something to try and make it work better So lastly, you want to have Conversion Tracking set up You want to make sure that if somebody submits a form, makes a call on your site, makes a call from your ad, that all those things are tracking for conversion, so you can boil it down to okay, these are the action that were taken from the ads that I spent money on—I got ten phone calls, I got four form submissions in the last week—and then you can quantify that into okay, that’s worth X amount of business Each one of those is worth $500, let’s say So we had $7,000 come into the business, and we spent $500 in ads

That way you can quantify an ROI If it can’t be—if you’re not tracking it, it can’t be measured So it’s very important that you do that So I hope this helps you with your mindset on pay-per-click marketing So if you ever need help, or want someone to manage these campaigns for you, that’s what we do

We’re here for that So thanks for tuning in, we appreciate you, and with that we’ll leave you with a quote [outro music]